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It was the best opportunity the Blue Jays could have hoped for. With their season on the line, all they had to do was beat a soft-tossing kid left-hander making only the second start of his big-league career.

Two weeks ago, this same kid was trying to get raw minor-leaguers out in instructional league ball. Surely, they could beat Ryan Merritt and send this American League Championship Series back to Cleveland for a thrilling conclusion.

Ah, but such has been the unpredictability of the 2016 Toronto Blue Jays. In the biggest game he might ever pitch in the big leagues, Merritt dominated the Blue Jays just long enough for the Cleveland Indians to build a 3-0 lead. He then turned the game over to Cleveland’s lockdown bullpen and it was essentially over.

For the second year in a row, the Blue Jays made it to baseball’s final four, but could not take that last step to qualify for the Fall Classic. In 2015, they stretched the Kansas City Royals to a six-game ALCS. This time, they only lasted five games in a series in which their power bats simply melted.

“It was a crazy year,” said manager John Gibbons. “Some ups, some downs. One thing you’ve heard me say: It’s a special group. They had another great year and we got to this point again. We weren’t able to get over the hump again.”

After pounding the Texas Rangers in a three-game ALDS sweep, the Jays scored only eight runs in five games against Cleveland. It’s a testament to Toronto’s pitching that the Indians scored only 12 runs, yet still won four games out of five. The Blue Jays actually outhit the Indians .202 to .174, but in the home run department — where the Blue Jays are supposed to reign — they lost that battle 6-2 over the course of the series. That was the difference.

“We never really had a big inning,” said catcher Russell Martin. “Never able to string some hits together. You can point the finger at us and say we didn’t do a good job or you can point the finger at those guys. To get us out, you have to pitch well and they did.”

Whatever momentum the Blue Jays had gained in their 5-1 victory on Tuesday disappeared in the early moments of Game 5. With two out in the top of the first, Francisco Lindor singled. Mike Napoli then hammered a double off the top of the scoreboard wall in left. When left fielder Ezequiel Carrera mishandled the ball off the wall, Lindor scored all the way from first on the error.

That seemed to take a lot of the air out of the building, but a bit later, when Carlos Santana belted a solo home run into the right-field seats, the place fell into stunned silence. The same scene was repeated another inning later when Coco Crisp followed suit with another home run to right to make it 3-0.

With the lefty Merritt releasing himself further from anonymity with every strike he threw, the Blue Jays were hardly a threat. Merritt, who was pitching in the Indians’ instructional league camp as recently as two weeks ago, had little difficulty keeping the veteran lineup at bay, mixing pitches together at speeds ranging from 86 mph to 67 mph. It seemed a totally baffling experience for a team that used to eat left-handed pitchers for breakfast.

“We only got two at-bats against him, but he wasn’t making mistakes,” said Martin, who had one of the two singles Merritt yielded. “Even though he didn’t have great velocity, he was still commanding the inside part of the plate with the fastball and cutter, changing speeds with the changeup, even using his curveball. He just kept us off-balance. He pitched a simple game and it worked for him.”

First time through the order, Merritt was perfect: Nine up, nine down. In the fourth, Josh Donaldson delivered Toronto’s first hit with a one-out line drive into left-centre. Merritt calmly induced a double-play ball from Edwin Encarnacion’s bat to get out of it. In the fifth, after Troy Tulowitzki hit a long fly ball that Crisp caught at the wall, Martin blooped Toronto’s second hit into short centre field.

That was enough for Francona. He lifted Merritt and went to veteran reliever Bryan Shaw. Shaw promptly gave up a single to pinch-hitter Michael Saunders to put two men on, but Shaw bowed his neck and struck out Carrera and Pillar in succession.

In the sixth, Bautista touched Shaw for a one-out single and Francona was not going to let that little bit of smoke turn into a full-blown blaze. He summoned his fire chief, Andrew Miller, who quickly doused the fire with a double-play ball.

Meanwhile, jays starter Marco Estrada hung in through six innings, allowing only five base runners. Unfortunately for him, three of them scored. There were the two homers and the back-to-back first inning hits to go with a harmless third-inning single. He retired the last 10 batters he faced, but the damage had already been done.

In his two starts in the series, both losses, Estrada logged 14 innings and allowed four earned runs. More importantly, his Blue Jays teammates did not score once when he was on the mound.

It is a sad end on so many levels for a team that had such promise.

These Blue Jays didn’t even get the chance, in the proud tradition of 21st-century winners in all sports, to jump up and down at the end and remind anyone who would listen that nobody ever believed in them. Well, nobody except those 3.4-million fans who filled the Rogers Centre night after night and made this team the American League leaders in attendance.

Or the millions who sat at home, eyeballs riveted to their TV sets night after night. Or the good folks from the prairies and Maritimes who lavished their hard-earned dollars on summer vacations to Seattle or Anaheim or Chicago or Oakland or Boston or New York just so the Jays could feel at home in enemy territory.

“I’m proud of these guys and I know the organization is proud of them, too,” said Gibbons. “Hopefully, the fans are just as proud of them because it’s an entertaining group. They put on a good show. They just got beat in this series.”

The game is supposed to stab you in the heart sometimes. What fun would it be otherwise? It’s supposed to sweep you away, take you somewhere else, make you laugh and cry and high-five some dude you met exactly two beers ago. You watch because you never know when that transcendent moment is going to come, but it will. If you stay long enough and believe hard enough, it will. Probably.

But, as sure as the sun comes up in the morning, this edition of the Blue Jays that had so much unfulfilled promise will fade into history. There is new management in town. Mark Shapiro and Co. have already started to put their own indelible imprint on this ball club and that will only accelerate now that their first season at the helm is complete. With nine free agents about to come off the roster, that alone changes the face of the team.

Shapiro has indicated to Rogers Sportsnet reporters that manager John Gibbons’ job is safe.

Shapiro and GM Ross Atkins have an outstanding core group of young, controllable players to build around, players who have already tasted playoff baseball. They also have an ownership group that is revelling in newly found revenue streams that they hope will continue to grow.

To do that, Rogers will have to embrace the old adage “you have to spend money to make money,” which has not always been their policy as it pertains to this baseball enterprise.

kfidlin@postmedia.com

INDIANS REVEL IN WIN

Jose Bautista opined on Tuesday that Ryan Merritt would be “shaking in his boots” on the mound in Wednesday’s game, only the second start of his big-league career.

Instead of shaking in his boots, he gave Bautista and the rest of the Jays the boot right out of the playoffs, tossing 4.1 innings and allowing just two base runners.

Merritt’s accomplishment had Andrew Miller, star of the Indians’ bullpen, in awe.

“I try to stay out of the media, but it was impossible to miss,” said Miller of Bautista’s comments. “Some guys are into it. The TV’s on in the clubhouse, we hear stuff.

“Everybody reacts differently. Some people use it as fuel and other people ignore it. And, Ryan Merritt, I assume he didn’t pay any attention at all. He went out and did what everybody expected him to do, which is pretty amazing considering he had one major-league start. What a day for him.”

Toronto Blue Jays’ Marco Estrada during Game 5 of the American League Championship Series between Toronto Blue Jays and Cleveland Indians in Toronto on Oct. 19, 2016. (Craig Robertson/Toronto Sun/Postmedia Network)